After binge watching basically every TV series that Neflix has to interest me, I decided to meander on over to Amazon Prime, where I found Flesh and Bone. As a ballet dancer, I have a guilty pleasure of watching ballet movies for the sole purpose of identifying the unrealistic aspects of them. While I typically am extremely disappointed with either the dancing or the acting in these movies and shows, "Flesh and Bone" had surprisingly good dancing and good acting. After watching the first episode, I was hooked; and trust me, I was not expecting that.
Flesh and Bone is an eight episode mini-series about a girl named Claire, who escaped from her abusive older brother and made it into the fictional, American Ballet Company. There obviously some unrealistic aspects in the show, like how Claire took three years off of ballet and then suddenly finds herself the star of a new contemporary ballet choreographed just for her, but overall I was thoroughly entertained.
The show is extremely melodramatic, but all in all, I think it works. Like I said earlier, I am pretty critical of ballet movies and TV shows, so this is a good compliment coming from me. Each of the main characters had their own problems and demons inside themselves that they were forced to face, and I thought that the creator, Moira Walley-Beckette, did a great job at exploring the very extreme aspects of the ballet world. There were of course all the obvious overdone stereotypes, like Mia, the anorexic corps dancer, who buys cookies just to stair at, Kiira, the prima ballerina on the brink of retirement, and Paul, the eccentric gay artistic director with anger management problems, but there were a lot of interesting twists throughout the show as well.
While this apparently is very old news for the rest of the internet who watched the series a year ago, Flesh and Bone will not be returning for a second season. The cost of production was too high to sustain, which is understandable because nothing about this show looks cheap. All of the dancers are professionally trained and absolutely beautiful, as well as the costumes and choreography. According to Moira Walley-Beckette, they had to have physical therapists on set all the time and the best floors in the dance business to ensure the safety of the dancers. While a lot of matters were tied up by the end of Season One, I still have so many questions, so I wish there was a Season Two, if only to watch the dancing.
